By BILL KELLER
Published: April 7, 2013
THE defenders of traditional marriage tell us the argument is, first and foremost, about the children. You might not know that from the buzz surrounding the Supreme Court deliberations. The children of gay and lesbian parents got a few splashes of attention, including a powerful endorsement of marriage equality from the 60,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics and one sympathetic-sounding aside from Justice Anthony Kennedy during the hearings. But for the most part, the debate has focused on the rights of grown-ups and the powers of states, not so much on the well-being of children. And when that subject does come up, the discussion is often shallow or misleading.
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Bill Keller
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So let’s talk about the children.
The stakes for children in this debate fall roughly into two categories. One is legal: A great scaffolding of laws and benefits created to keep children secure and loved is denied to children who grow up with parents of the same gender. Can that be solved without letting same-sex couples marry? The other is social: Researchers have attempted to ascertain whether kids who grow up with two moms or two dads fare differently from kids growing up with one of each. Is there any reason to think same-sex households are bad for children, and if so should policy makers tread carefully?
Take the legal question first.
Nobody knows how the Supreme Court will rule, but the best guess of court-watchers is this: The justices will throw out the federal Defense of Marriage Act, assuring that married same-sex couples will be entitled to approximately the same treatment under federal law as other couples. But they seem likely to leave it up to the states to decide whether gays can get married in the first place.
That means, first of all, that states can continue to deny children of homosexuals many safeguards that protect children of straight couples. The history of this issue is filled with stories of hardship and heartbreak befalling children whose parents are not recognized as — well, as parents. There are the cases of mothers and fathers turned away from a child’s hospital bed because they are not “family.” There are the cases of beloved adults denied visitation rights after a breakup. Many states restrict the ability of a gay parent to adopt or to respond to a child’s medical emergency. Divorce laws were created in large part to assure that children get financial and emotional support when marriages end: no marriage, no divorce, no support.
It is true that a well-crafted civil union law — one that assures gay and lesbian partners the same spousal parenting rights as marriage — can help remedy these cruelties. But many states do not offer civil unions at all. Among those that do, not all civil union laws are so rigorous; some are mere approximations of equality that do not confer full parental rights. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg might refer to them as “skim-milk civil unions.”
And civil unions do not address the stigma attached to being treated as if your family is not a “real” family — a stigma that amounts to an official imprimatur for bullying and humiliation. “Kids understand and internalize the sense that something is wrong with their families and that they should be ashamed,” said Camilla Taylor of Lambda Legal, who has followed many of these cases through the courts.
Which brings us to the social question. Defenders of the status quo (including Justice Antonin Scalia) would have you believe that the research on children growing up with gay parents is deeply ambiguous. If you spend time in the recent archives of such periodicals as Pediatrics, Applied Developmental Science, Social Science Research and the Journal of Marriage and Family, you will learn otherwise.
Taken one by one, the studies are far from perfect. The samples are usually small and not random. Few are “longitudinal” — that is, following subjects over years or decades. Social science rarely delivers conclusive results under the best circumstances, and with same-sex marriage researchers face particular handicaps. The number of children who have been raised entirely by stable, same-sex couples is relatively small. (According to the demographer Gary Gates of U.C.L.A., a majority of children being raised by gay or lesbian parents were born to opposite-sex couples who later broke up.) Homosexuality still encounters bigotry that makes potential study subjects wary. And it is hard to untangle all the variables in the raising of children.
But it is fair to say that the research shows no significant disadvantage associated with being raised by lesbian mothers or gay fathers — not in academic performance, not in psychological health, not in social or sexual development, not in violent behavior or substance abuse. And the research leaves little doubt that stable, two-parent households (of whatever flavor) are likely to be better off financially, more attentive to the upbringing of children and more secure than single-parent households.
(You can find excellent roundups of this work in the March issue of Pediatrics, and in the amicus brief of the American Sociological Association.)
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